In the past few days, Baixin Bank has disclosed the technical structure for the first time, and the amount of information is very large. This is my country's first direct-selling bank with an independent legal representative, an Internet company that purely builds its business on the cloud, and a financial institution that is using AI to build a smart brain.
Although cloud computing has been talked about for many years, it has gradually landed in the industry. But among financial institutions, there are few banks that really use distributed architecture to build infrastructure. In this sense, the distributed architecture jointly created by Baixin Bank and Baidu Cloud carries innovation - it also means risks and opportunities, which are of great significance to both Baixin Bank and Baidu Cloud.
So, how is Baixin Bank's cloud infrastructure built, and how does it think about the future? Not long ago, Kou Guan, Chief Information Officer of Baixin Bank, and Yu Haohan, Chief Architect of Baixin Bank, made an interpretation to the media. Based on the information at the exchange meeting, we took a look at the specific situation and tried to restore the full picture of Baixin Bank's IT system.
2018, the year of strategy landing
Kou Guan disclosed the future planning of Baixin Bank's IT system. The strategy is divided into three stages.
Fintech: 2018 is the initial stage and a period of strategic trial and error. The goal is to consolidate the foundation of Fintech and lay the foundation for future development.
Scenario finance: Build Baixin Bank's capability advantages, find its own unique development space, and form competitiveness.
Focus on business, and finally come to the strategic goal.
It can be seen from this strategy that Baixin Bank's system and business are currently in the process of integration and growth. After all, Baixin Bank bears the country's innovative mission in the financial field. It must develop boldly and be careful not to "touch a thunderbolt". As we all know, China's Internet finance has been very active in the past two years. While innovating continuously, there have also been many negative incidents of P2P companies, which have brought extremely bad influence to the entire industry. As my country's regulatory authorities tighten policies in the financial sector, compliance with laws and regulations has become a red line, not to mention that the major shareholders are institutions such as China CITIC Bank and Baidu.
From the perspective of the industry background, Baixin Bank is destined to go very stable and take the road of differentiation. According to the information previously disclosed by Baixin Bank, it will be positioned in "focusing on intelligence and inclusiveness, building core capabilities such as smart accounts, smart risk control and smart services, and focusing on the weak and untouched blank areas of traditional banking services for dislocation development." ." The company's name is aiBank, which also reflects the emphasis on new technologies such as AI.
2018 is a year of consolidation of Baixin Banking system.
The goal is Zhirong OS
Under this strategy, Baixin Bank has formulated a detailed IT architecture development plan.
First of all, it is necessary to build the IT system of Zhirong OS. The name has two meanings. 1. OS is the operating system, which will become the infrastructure of all businesses of Baixin Bank. 2. OS takes the two initials of English Open and Share, which means open and share.
Zhirong OS has three platforms: a financial scenario innovation platform, an open financial service platform, an open technology capability platform; and an internal open source community. At present, the construction of 39 business systems and 9 non-business systems has been completed; 7 customer contact channels; 9 business products have been released.
Specifically, Baixin Bank and Baidu Cloud built a private cloud and passed regulatory acceptance. The entire architecture adopts an enterprise-level distributed architecture, and all systems have achieved distributed transformation, which has also formed a governance framework for microservices that is highly respected by the Internet. It is actively exploring such as integration of development, operation and maintenance, grayscale release, etc. "In addition to big data, Baixin Bank uses open source technology to develop its own streaming computing platform (AI Stream), which plays a greater role in supporting business risk monitoring and strategic intervention."
Baixin Bank has a high starting point, and building an OS is one of the performances, which is completely different from the "IOE" architecture of the bank in the past. This OS is equivalent to laying the foundation. It is one of the IT capability platforms of Baixin Bank, and it is also one of the manifestations of Baidu Cloud's ABC capabilities. It is also a platform for the external output of Baixin Bank's IT capabilities in the future.
How difficult will the distributed architecture of the bank be?
Baixin Bank's all-cloud architecture will become a banner in the industry and a model project in the field of Baidu Cloud Banking.
Based on the distributed architecture, it is conducive to the flexible deployment of resources, saving costs, and changing with the change of business scale. This is a common knowledge in the industry. However, due to the special nature of the banking industry, in addition to meeting regulatory requirements, security, stability and strong consistency are issues that must be considered, which are also the key factors for prudent cloud adoption with the banking industry. Therefore, based on the existing business systems, most banks are gradually moving to the cloud, that is, moving non-core business systems to the cloud, such as the launch of new businesses and the promotion of Double Eleven festivals, to the public cloud, and rarely all of them are going to the cloud.
"Before we built the distributed architecture, we also considered adopting the IOE architecture, so that the system could be launched in a relatively short time. At that time, our concern was whether the distributed architecture could be launched stably in a relatively short period of time?" Kou Guan Frankly.
If you look back at the cloud architecture of Baixin Bank at a specific time point, you will find that they faced the following challenges at that time.
The whole industry has little or no reference. Does the all-cloud architecture support the entire business and meet the requirements of bank supervision?
How to transform the existing mature banking system to conform to the open distributed architecture?
How to build an open platform, including the capabilities from the IaaS layer to the PaaS layer, especially the capabilities of PaaS?
How to resolve the pressure in a relatively short period of time, such as testing, development, operation, stability, etc.?
The consistency of distributed architecture and the balance of business data are also one of the biggest challenges for banks to migrate to the cloud.
Whether it is possible to solve the problem of talents, it is necessary to understand the business of the banking industry and have a deep understanding of the distributed architecture.
Facts have proved that, combined with the capabilities of Baidu Cloud ABC, since its official opening in November last year, Baixin Bank’s system has been stable, with no operational accidents above level 5. The system’s high availability index is 100%, which means zero safety liability accidents. Baixin Bank adopted a distributed architecture in a relatively short period of time, which proved to be feasible. Moreover, all banking business systems have been online after the transformation of the distributed architecture, which is also a great point.
"Fast, stable, economical, and open are the characteristics of Baixin Bank's distributed architecture, and it is also the future direction." Yu Haohan added that "fast" means launching in a relatively short time, and iteratively upgrades continuously, such as version release at least once a week; Support the innovation speed of new business, in line with the principle of "fast" Internet. Stability means that the system background is stable, meets industry regulatory requirements, and is controllable and credible; province means saving costs in all aspects and maximizing efficiency. Openness is to absorb the strengths of hundreds of schools and build their own ecology.
aiBank is a smart bank
Baixin Bank is building big data capabilities and AI capabilities based on OS, which is also the biggest difference from other banks.
This year, Baixin Bank has just established the Big Data Department with the following responsibilities:
Responsible for the infrastructure construction of the bank's big data platform, with Baidu Cloud participating in the co-construction;
Responsible for the overall planning and design of the bank's data architecture, including modeling, data acquisition, and data quality control.
Responsible for the promotion of data applications and practice data-driven strategies.
Kou Guan said that the big data department will become the "general staff", the management will make management decisions, and the product department will make product development, launch and test production, all of which must be based on the data provided by this department, so that data can become an asset. Data drives business innovation.
Baixin Bank is building Baixin's financial brain by setting up a joint experiment with Baidu. The goal is to build an AI model based on Baixin Bank's infrastructure, integrate the internal underlying technology and business support capabilities into AI capabilities, and dynamically respond to customer requests in real time.
Describe it with a metaphor. Rongzhi OS is the underlying platform, the human skeleton and torso. Big data is responsible for collecting, sorting, storing, exchanging and processing data, and it is the blood and vascular system in the human body. Understand the operation of internal architecture, technology, data, and products; schedule and reflect internal requests and external user experience at any time to achieve intelligent decision-making.
In the future, Baixin Bank will rely on this financial brain to make business innovations in the fields of payment, financing and wealth management to achieve inclusive finance. At present, this is the direction of the force.
Interview Notes: Where Does IT Capability Come From?
The headquarters of Baixin Bank is located in an office building between the third and fourth ring roads in Beijing. It is very Internet-based and has an open layout. It is an open office environment; it has complete facilities, including a tea room, gym, reading room, activity area, etc. The decoration style is similar to the company's logo color. The main colors are orange red and blue. For example, the business area is orange red, which is full of passion and motivation; the IT system department is blue, which gives people a sober and calm feeling.
Take a tour and feel that it is an Internet innovation company, not a traditional banking company. For example, the access control adopts a face recognition system, and you can enter by swiping your face; there are codes and major events in the wall propaganda, which is relatively fresh; the IT population accounts for more than 60~70%, which is a typical ratio, and many people have banks. industry and BAT background.
Baixin Bank has in-depth cooperation with Baidu Cloud in terms of underlying technology and architecture. Relying on Baidu Cloud's ABC technology capabilities, Baixin Bank has built a private cloud, built an open and intelligent OS platform, and built Baixin's financial brain together. In this regard, Baidu Cloud is positioned in technology empowerment, and will also take advantage of such opportunities to sort out the pain points of financial technology and form industry-recognized solutions to promote popularization. This can also be regarded as Baixin Bank's contribution to the industry.
The overall feeling is that Baixin Bank's IT system foundation, framework, and future planning have been established, and all capabilities are being gradually built. The next step will be faster and faster, and will give full play to new technologies such as big data and AI. Ability to fully support business innovation. From this point of view, the development of Baixin Bank is worth looking forward to.